London Conference (1939)

The London Conference (1939), or St James Palace Conference, was called by the British Government to plan the future governance of Palestine and an end of the Mandate. It opened on 7 February 1939 in St James's Palace after which the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald held a series of separate meetings with an Arab and a Jewish delegation, because the Arab delegation refused to sit in the same room as the Jewish delegation. When MacDonald first announced the proposed conference he made clear that if no agreement was reached the government would impose a solution. The process came to an end after five and a half weeks with the British announcing proposals which were later published as the 1939 White Paper

On 1936 Arabs in Palestine went for a 1936 general strike. During the strike, Palestinian Arab leaders formed the Higher National Committee (HNC).

Following the strike the British Government established the Peel Commission, chaired by Lord Peel, to investigate the causes of the general strike, and to make recommendations to the British government, in the light of commitments made in the Balfour Declaration, to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. The commission concluded that the only solution was to partition the country into a Jewish State and an Arab State . The two main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and Ben Gurion had convinced the Zionist Congress to approve equivocally the Peel recommendations as a basis for more negotiation.

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